21 May 2010

Watching 4oD without the Adverts - UPDATED DECEMBER 2014

I've started watching more shows online these days rather than sitting in front of the TV and flipping through the channels. I began with BBC iPlayer watching Spooks, Paradox, Merlin and a few others. I then started watching some shows over at 4oD last night. I quickly became annoyed at the amount of adverts! I remember back when 4oD used to be a program on your PC and you could download the show and watch them advert free. These days have changed I've soon found out.

Because I connect to the internet on my laptop by tethering my G1 phone to it, my internet sometimes gets lost and I have to reconnect. If this happens when I'm watching 4oD, the show will have to be restarted and I'll have to go through the 3 adverts at the start of the show. If I was far enough along, the 2nd set of 3 adverts would then also have to reload.

Being that this happened a few times I needed to find a fix to this problem. And I have...

The FAQ page on the 4oD site gives some advise to those people using Ad-blocking software and a way to check to see if they're having problems with it. What this also does, is provide some vital information that we need to easily block the ads from showing on the shows.

Some of you may be familiar with what a HOSTS file is. For those of you that aren't, it's your computers first point of call before it travels out to the internet to a DNS server to translate the URL you type into a set of numbers computers can communicate with. Think of it as a complex form of turning a phone number like 1-800-COLLECT into 1 800 265 5328

Essentially, what this would allow you to do is to tell your computer that when you type www.google.com for it to go to www.bing.com instead all the time. In this case however, we want to tell our computer to look at our own computer for the answer, yielding no result at all.

****UPDATED JUNE 2011****

Thanks to an anonymous poster recently I've updated the following steps to the following

Watch the first set adverts from the show of your choice

Pause show

Locate your hosts file (you will need to have administrator rights and change it from read-only)

Windows - C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\

Mac - /private/etc/hosts

Add these 3 entries on new lines at the end of the file

127.0.0.1 s0.2mdn.net

127.0.0.1 realmedia.channel4.com

127.0.0.1 webstat.channel4.com

Ensure browser is set to not clear browsing history on exit

Link to Chrome options where "Clear Cookies and other site data" should not be ticked - chrome://settings/content

Hey Steve, looking at your solution I think there are problems if you have no cache and no cookies for 4od. I tried on a machine that is fresh to 4od and the video seems to hang without playing anything at all. Can you replicate this?

I have the same problem as Chris, the vid just hangs on loading with a clean cache. I've used the hosts file for a few things now and was getting quite excited when I read this... Any fix/info? Cheers.

to those people who have problems with 4oD Ads workaround:I've found that the video can hang as well. The way around was to remove the entries from the host file and then reopen the browser and play any 4oD program including the ads.Close the browser and edit the host file again and put the entries back. But DO NOT CLEAR the cache.Try the video again and it worked for me. This was on the MAC but I think the principle applies to Windows as well.

in you hosts file. Everything works fine. 216.120.238.16 is tania-lynne.com and they happen to have the file (crossdomain.xml) located on their server. This is needed by the 4od flash player if it is not in your cache already.

do a nbtstat -R and ipconfig /flushdns after editing the file to take on the changes; or just reboot. Win 7 and Vista you need to launch notepad as Administrator to edit the host file located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

If you HAVE already watched 4OD WITH adverts:1. Insert the lines into the hosts file.2. The 4OD program should work perfectly UNTIL clearing the cache*.

If you have NOT already watched 4OD WITH adverts:1. Go to 4OD and play a program WITH adverts (Thus WITHOUT altering the hosts file).2. Close the browser.3. Locate and open the hosts file with a text editor (I.E. Notepad).4. Insert the lines (mentioned in the main article above) at the end of the file on their own separate lines.5. Save and close the hosts file, and enjoy playing 4OD without adverts!

*Clearing the cache 4OD will not play the program until you've watched an advert.

"Essentially, what this would allow you to do is to tell your computer that when you type www.google.com for it to go to www.bing.com instead all the time."

does this mean you could make it so that everytime you try to go to www.facebook.com it could redirect you to a revision site? I know a lot of students who find that their facebook addiction gets in the way of important revision and would find this really useful!

Hi, Cheers for the great tip I can watch 4od with no ads, Only problem is this works on my desktop which has xp but on my laptop running windows 7 I can not get it to work. I know how yo edit the file but the ads keep showing up even with cache and after reboot. Has anyone any ideas PLEASE!!

Also the hosts file is a little different on win7 should I still add lines as they are here to the end of the file?

This still works great! Thank you. I watch a lot of UK TV from Australia via VPN and it drives me nuts on the 4oD site when the ads come on, flash player becomes unresponsive. Now it just plays flawlessly. Thank you very much :)

For the last couple of months it has stopped working for me :(. My firefox is definitely remembering history. But sometimes after a few restarts of firefox or maybe my PC. I have to start from scratch. By deleting the two lines in hosts and then waiting for the first 3 ads and pausing and reinserting them. Quite irritating. Adblock plus has never worked for block ads for me. Any ideas anyone? cheers

Mine stopped working a couple of months ago :( firefox is definitely remembering history (and doesn't work in chrome either). Same scenario in both. It works for a short while. Maybe until I've restarted or a few restarts of firefox, not sure. But after a day at most the shows won't play at all unless I delete the 2 lines from hosts. Then I have to pause after the first 3 ads and paste the 2 lines back in and restarting firefox to get it to work again. Quite annoying to do this often.

And on a side note adblock plus has never worked for me in terms of blocking these ads, unless there's a specific rule for them I don't know of.

Anyway, it's not quite such a cool 'fix', but if you watch the ads at the start of the show, then skip to the end of the show, it will realise you haven't watch the later ads so it will play you the last lot. But then you can skip back to the beginning, & watch the whole show with no more ads! The viewer must remember that you've now watched the last lot, & therefore not play any more ads!

Thanks for the article Steve. I don’t see 4oD coming to my country anytime soon. However, there are plenty of workarounds available to access it here in my country. Personally, I use UnoTelly for more than a year and I can access 4oD like I am in UK.